POEM ME, YOU FOOL! | redclaydiary.com

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When I was a mere bud on the verge of wilting or blooming, I discovered that I was alive. Not just existing, not just the figment of somebody’s bad-joke imagination, not just a folktale, not just a lump of granite…I was actually alive, I realized.

Up to that point in my brief life, I had existed on pure instinct and template, breathing, eating, obeying the rules created and enforced by beings in charge of my care. I got along, and it looked as if the world around me got along, too.

Then, one day, I yelled Shazam! and woke up to the fact that I was alive.

It was an amazement.

This kind of thing can happen only once, you know. It’s a unique experience. After all, you can’t wake up one day and discover that you’re dead. Alive is all you know.

Anyhow, after I was born, it took me a few years to come alive…but once alive, I began to record my living, my life. I wrote with crayons on walls, with large thick grammar-school-red number two pencils on butcher paper, with quill dipped in indelible ink on onionskin, with strong finger-jabs at manual typewriter keys, and eventually with keyboard-clickety glowing electronic screen.

What did I write?

Well, poetry, I guess.

What was my first poem?

Uh, I don’t know. But a very early poem came from my telescopic examination of the universe above me. I noticed that planets and satellites had texture, some human-made, some accidental-acts-of-geology-made. Thus, the poem:

Mars has scars,

The Moon has moles,

Jupiter has bars,

And Earth has H-Bomb holes.

Go figure.

Every poem or story I wrote reminded me that I was alive. What came out of my mind and heart and gut traveled through my fingers and wound up in print. Most of the time, the writings just popped out, unedited and ready to read. Sometimes I had no idea where they came from or what they meant. But they were always deeply felt. I had the idea that if I felt what I was writing, the reader would, too. After a half century of writing, this fact eventually had gravitas. After I wrote a few thousand pieces, I became confident, the words flowed easily, and I developed a to-heck-with-rules attitude and just write what I damned well please.

This is fun.

Now, it’s your turn to discover that you are alive.

Prove it.

Write me a poem